Open Scholarship

My first thought about this reading is one that echoes what others in the group have said, that open scholarship is seldom free. It may be a “free price” to the end user, but much of the time, institutional support in the form of grant funding, or ongoing funding is behind the scenes. Wikipedia is frequently posting a request for donations, at risk it would seem of shutting down. That is because there is always maintenance of the site, to keep it open, and this costly in terms of time if not money.

I have seen this play out in my own work with the Muhlenberg College Digital Repository. The amount of time on the institutional dime that I have spent to post faculty work to the site, and keep citations current, is not insignificant. I had visions of the work being a seamless flow from faculty to me, but the reality is that life gets in the way. Good intentions are just that. And so what seemed like an easy process at first becomes complex and time-consuming.

Another thought I have is with regard to open production via crowdsourcing. Anytime production is non-discriminatory, it runs the risk of diminishing the quality of the product. This is the risk of openness, that in the democratization of participation, quality suffers because participants needs not have credentials to contribute. I think this is the challenge of efforts like Wikipedia. Although the quality of many entries is high, there is widespread suspicion at citing Wikipedia as a source because authors are anonymous and so unable to display their credentials.

Also, open distribution is only open to those who have access to the Internet. For those unable to afford Internet access, access is impeded no matter open the distribution purports to be.